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I completed my PhD in 2006 in Computer Science at Carleton University, School of Computer Science, Ottawa, Canada. I was the winner of the University Senate Medal for outstanding research achievements. From 2006 to 2007, I worked as a research associate at the National Research Council (NRC) of Canada for the language technology group in Gatineau, in the field of Machine Translation. In 2007, I received the prestigious NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship. From 2007 until 2011, I worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Ottawa, under the supervision of Dr. David Sankoff, where my research focused on genome rearrangement and data-mining. I worked, and I am still working, on a research project with Dr. Marcel Turcotte (Joint Bioinformatics Program Associate Director [2010-12], and Vice-Dean of Undergraduate Studies), School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Ottawa) The project involves discovering and localizing interacting RNA secondary structures.

At King Saud University, I established the Bioinformatics-Research Group (BioInG)[1]. I am the coordinator for the group since Fall 2012[2]. Through it, I was able to attract researchers from different departments, and to develop significant research activities and workshops. My current projects focus on data-mining and data science (Medical data, such as brain signals, mass spectrum data, social media, and Fourier transformed infrared, used for early diagnoses of cancer). Taking into consideration that it was not easy for a woman in Saudi Arabia society, I was able to develop projects and attract funding to the university (more than one million Saudi Riyals). Using this fund, I supported a PhD student, five master students, and five undergraduates. I also organized the 1st and 2nd Bioinformatics meeting workshop at KSU on May 4, 2014 and May 4th-5th, 2015 respectively. They were such successful events that attracted invited speakers from different universities and research institutes in KSA and outside KSA. They also included poster competitions. In addition, I established a Bioinformatics laboratory equipped with HPC servers. These machines are currently serving students and researchers working in HPC projects. I started with only few who are familiar with the field, and currently the group includes more than 40 members from diverse backgrounds and research interests. We also have research collaborations with research centers in KSA, such as King Faisal Hospital and King Abdullah for Science and Technology. Through that collaboration, several training opportunities are made available for both junior and senior researchers, who would like to start conducting their research on a Big Data project for Next Generation Sequencing Data. I got promoted to Associate Professor on December 27th, 2015.

During my position at KSU, I applied a lot of Machine Learning, Data Mining and Artificial Intelligent techniques on several topics and projects, including but not limited to: Microarray Data analysis, RNAseq data analysis, social network analysis, sentiment data analysis for reviews, mass-spectrum data analysis, educational data mining, and structural variation and next generation sequences data analysis. These are avenues of research that I would like to continue with.

I am also the Head of the CCIS lab committee (Female section) for College of Computer and Information Sciences.

Also, during the last few years, I was able to develop my experience in university teaching by taking courses in theory and practice of university teaching, teaching courses, and attending a lot of workshops. I taught courses in Bio-informatics, Data minning, Data warehouse, data structures, discrete structures 1 and II, formal language theory, OO programming and algorithm analysis and design.